Visual Signs and Digital Reproduction.pdf

Visual signs in the age of digital reproduction

Göran Sonesson

Published in Ensayos Semióticos, Dominios, modelos y miradas desde el cruce de la naturaleza y la cultura. Proceedings

of the 6th International Congress of the IASS, Guadalajara, Mexico, July 13 to 19, Gimate Welsh, Adrián, (ed.), 1073-

1084. México: Pourrua.

Post-photography (like post-modernity) is really the name of a position: the distance from which it

becomes possible to analyse photography. This position itself derives from a historical event: the arrival of

the computer image. Photography, like many other terms employed in pictorial semiotics, is a common-

sense notion, which it is the task of semiotic theory to reconstruct. As such it designates a particular way

of producing, by means of a mechanical device, such marking on the surface which give rise to the illusion

of seeing a scene of the experimental world projected onto a two-dimensional surface, as well as that

peculiar granularity which was until recently immediately recognized as the expression plane resulting

from such a process. The dissociation of these two (or more) concurrent qualities transforms the arrival of

computer-aided picture construction into an element of social rhetoric.

Photography as texture and construction

Indeed, leading authorities of pictorial semiotics such as Floch (1986) and Groupe µ (1992) have denied

the semiotic relevance of such putatively "socio-cultural" categories as photography. There is no reason to

agree with such a judgement. First of all, it is difficult to see why society should be excluded form the

semiotic domain: at least, analogously to what has been argued in the case of perceptual psychology by

Groupe µ, we should incorporate as many social parameters as is necessary for the purpose of analysing

signification. In the second place, photography is certainly not merely a social category. Rather, what is

socially grounded is our expectation that certain properties should go together, in other words, that they

should correspond to what the psychologist Eleanor Rosch (1978) calls a prototype, i.e. the most probable

combination of properties (cf. Sonesson 1989a). And probability ("le vraisemblable" of the French

structuralists) is certainly a social concept.

Elsewhere, I have suggested that we ordinarily distinguish pictures according to three kinds of categories:

construction types , such as oil paintings, linear drawings, and photographs; function types, determined by

socially anticipated purposes, such a caricatures, publicity pictures, and pornographic pictures; and

circulation types, defined by the channels through which pictures are conveyed from a creator to a

receiver, such as posters, frescoes, television pictures, and web-page pictures. Normally we expect certain

construction types, function types, and circulation types to go together: art, in the sense in which it was

conceived in the last century, and against which Modernism revolted, was ideally an oil painting

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Visual signs in the age of digital reproduction

(construction type), meant for aesthetic enjoyment (function type), circulating through galleries and

museums (circulation types; cf. Sonesson 1996). The case of the photograph is more intricate: it involves a

particular texture thought to be inseparably connected to a certain origin.

Unlike most other picture categories, photography has already engendered a small body of literature

concerned to lay bare the specificity of its sign function (cf. Sonesson 1989b; 1994). According to Philippe

Dubois (1983:20ff), the first semiotical theories of photography tended to look upon the photograph as a

mirror of reality, or, in Peircean terms, as an icon; then came that most celebrated generation of

iconoclasts who tried to demonstrate the conventionality of all signs, supposing even the photograph to

present a "coded" version of reality, or, as Peirce (according to Dubois, at least) would have said, a

symbol ; and finally the photograph was seen for what it really is, in Dubois’ view: an index , more

specifically, a trace left behind by the referent itself. Without subscribing to Dubois’ uni-linear story of

progress, I will use his distinctions as a handy classification of the relevant epistemological attitudes.

The authorities quoted by Dubois from the first period are in fact largely pre-semiotical: Baudelaire,

Taine, Benjamin, Bazin, but also Barthes. Most of the minor classics of semiotics are mustered for the part

of the symbol-addicted team: Metz, Eco, Barthes, Lindekens, Groupe µ, and so on. In the part of the

daring moderns, we find, apart from Dubois himself, such writers as Bonitzer, Krauss, Vanlier, but also

Barthes, Benjamin and Bazin, when considered from another vantage point, and, of course, Peirce. Barthes

here appears as a proponent of the iconic conception, because of having opposed the conventional,

historically relative, and learned character of drawing to the "quasi-tautological" nature which

photographic expression shows in relation to its content. His claim to be a vindicator of the symbol view

probably rests on his listing of photographic "connotations". And he is considered a pioneer for the index

theory for the reason that he has described each photograph as implying that "this has taken place" ("cela a

été"). In fact, also Peirce may be considered as an authority for all conceptions: he sometimes tells us the

photograph is an index, sometimes an icon, and elsewhere he observes that all real icons are somewhat

conventional.

The mapping rules of chirography

Actually, Barthes’ (1964) defence for the iconicity view may not be as naive as has been claimed by Floch

and others. It could be interpreted as the theory that drawing, but not photography, requires there to be a

set of rules for mapping perceptual experience onto marks made with a pen on paper; and these rules

imply a particular segmentation of the world as it is given to perception, picking up some (kinds of?)

features for reproduction, while rejecting others, and perhaps emphasising some properties at the same

time as others are underplayed; and all this takes place under given historical circumstances, which are

responsible for varying the emphases and the exclusions. Against this, it might be argued that Renaissance

perspective, and a lot of other principles of rendering, are built into the camera: but the point is precisely

that they are incorporated into the apparatus, and thus not present to consciousness in the actual process of

picture production.

The idea becomes more reasonable when expressed as a difference between the types of mapping rules

involved in photography and hand-made pictures, respectively. If we look upon the relationship between

the pictorial content and its referent in the outside world as a kind of indexicality, more in particular as a

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Visual signs in the age of digital reproduction

factorality (a relation of part to whole), we may interpret Barthes to claim that photography is able to pick

up particular proper parts ("son sujet", "son cadre") and perceptual angles of vision ("son angle") of the

whole motive, but cannot chose to render just a few of its attributes. In some all too obvious ways this is

false: for essential reasons, photography only transmits visual properties, and it only conveys such features

as are present on the sides of the object fronting the camera. Also, depending on the distance between the

camera and the motive, only features contained in a particular range of sizes may be included.

As long as no trick photography is involved, however, it seems to be true that, without recurring to later

modification of the exposed material, photography is merely able to pick up features, or restrict its

selection of features, on the global level, whereas in drawing, local decisions can be made for each single

feature (cf. Sonesson 1989b:36ff; Dubois 1983:96f). This also applies to all other rules of photographic

transposition listed by Ramírez (1981: 158ff) and Gubern (1974:50ff): abolition of the third dimension, the

delimitation of space through the frame, the exclusion of movement, mono-focal and static vision,

granular, discontinuous structure of the expression plane, abolition or distortion of colour, limitation to

scenes having a certain range of luminosity, and abolition of non-visual stimuli,.

The recent turn to an indexicalist position was taken together by Henri Vanlier (1983), Philippe Dubois

(1983), and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1987), yet the three theorists are very different in many respects. While

Dubois and Schaeffer base their claims on Peirce’s theory, Vanlier’s notion of indexicality (split into the

untranslatable opposition between "indice" and "index") is not really derived from Peirce; indeed, his

"indice" is actually, in the most literal sense, a mere trace, of which he offers some very usefully

descriptions. Schaeffer takes a less extreme stand than Vanlier and Dubois, arguing that the photograph is

an indexical icon, or, in other cases, an iconical index (cf. Sonesson 1989b: 46ff).

Limitations of indexicality

When photographs are said to be indexical, it is contiguity, not factorality, which is meant, and a particular

kind of contiguity at that: abrasion, i.e. the particular indexical relationship resulting from the fact that the

object which is to become the referent has, on some prior moment of time, entered into contact with, and

then detached itself from, what later is to become the expression plane of the sign, leaving on the surface

of the latter some visible trace, however inconspicuous, of the event (cf. Sonesson 1989a,40; 1989b:46ff).

In fact, as Vanlier (1983:15) notes, the photograph must be taken as a direct and certain imprint of the

photons, and only as an indirect and abstract one of the objects depicted. Unfortunately, Vanlier (1983:23,

25) himself rapidly seems to forget this distinction, talking about the scene as being the cause of the

picture. In any case, he fails to note that, if the indexicality obtains between the photons and the plate, it

does not occur between the same relata as the semiotic function, i.e. the objects depicted and the picture.

Dubois (1983:66) at least is more consistent with his conception of the photograph as being an index when

he takes the photogram to be its most characteristic instance; yet, if this is the kind of photograph he is

intent on explaining, he will fail to characterise what most people would consider prototypical

photography.

Certain limitations are imposed on the photographic trace by the support on which it is inscribed. Some of

these are mentioned by Vanlier: the quadrangular shape of the photograph, its digital nature, the

information it leaves out, its inability to record the temporal aspects of the process giving rise to the trace,

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Visual signs in the age of digital reproduction

etc. This may be restated by saying that the photograph is not only an indexicality of the objects, or even

the photons, but also of the properties of the film, of the lenses, of the photographic device generally, of

the space covered by the photons, and so on. This observation is quite parallel to the one made in the study

of animal traces, according to which the same animal will leave different traces on different ground (see

Sonesson 1989a,I.2.6. and 1989d)

The trouble with a purely indexicalist account of photography is that it cannot explain what the

photograph is a picture of. There is no intrinsic reasons for considering the cause producing a trace (and

even so, we have seen than many more causes than the motif may be held responsible for the trace) to be a

more important type of cause than the others. Indeed, we can only explain the importance of the motif,

when we realise that a trace, in the most central sense of the term, contains not only indexical but also

iconical aspects, and if we begin by admitting that a photograph is a kind of pictorial sign, and that all such

signs are first and foremost grounded in the illusion of similarity.

Contrary to Vanlier and Dubois, Schaeffer (1987:101ff) thinks that the photograph may be an indexical

icon in some cases, and, in other cases, an iconical index. It could be argued, however, that the

photograph, contrary, for example, to a hoof-print, is always primarily an icon (Sonesson 1989b:68ff).

While both the photograph and the hoof-print stand for a referent which has vanished from the scene, the

signifier of the former sign continues to occupy the place that was that of the referent, and it stills remains

temporally dated, whereas the photographic signifier, like that of the verbal sign, is omni-temporal and

omni-spatial, tokens of its type being apt to be instantiated at any time and place (although only after the

referential event and the time needed for development). In sum, in the case of a footstep, a hoof-print, etc.,

both the expression and the content are located at a particular time and place; in verbal language, none of

them are; and in the case of photography, it is only the content (or, strictly speaking, the referent) which is

bound up with spatio-temporality. Thus, the hoof-prints, present where before the horse was present, tells

us something like "horse here before"; but the photograph of a horse, which most likely does not occupy

the scene where the horse was before, only tells us "horse", and then we may start reconstructing the time

and the place .

At this point, it may seem that we could say that, whereas the hoof-print is first and foremost an index, the

photograph must originally be seen as an icon, before its indexical properties can be discovered. In fact,

however, things may be still more complicated. Schaeffer is of course right in pointing out, against Peirce,

that not all indices involve some iconic aspect, but it so happens that the hoof-prints, just like all other

imprints and traces, in the narrow sense of these terms, also convey a partial similarity with the objects for

which they stand. We have to recognise the hoof-print as such, that is, differentiate if from the traces of a

man’s feet, or of a donkey’s, a well as from fake hoof-prints, and from accidental formations worked by

the wind in the sand. Only then can we interpret the hoof-prints indexically. It remains true, however, that

the essential meanings of the hoof-prints are embodied in indexicality: they tell us the whereabouts of the

animal.

In the case of a photograph, on the other hand, we do not need to conceive of it indexically to be able to

grasp its meaning. It will continue to convey signification to us, whether we are certain that it is a

photograph or not. Indexicality, in photographs, really is a question of second thoughts and peculiar

circumstances. It therefore appears that indexicality cannot be the primary sign relation of photographs,

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although it is an open potentiality present in their constitution, which is exploited in certain cases. First

and foremost, the photograph is an iconical sign.

The proof of this is that of two pictures which look exactly alike, one may be a photograph and the other

could have been constructed on the computer with the aid of some graphic application, either be

combining elements of photographs scanned into the computer, or by using some algorithms for

calculating the three-dimensional viewpoint and the position of the sources of light. But it is quite

reasonable to claim that, at the present time, both pictures convey a connotation of photographicalness (as

do, of course, to a lesser extent, some hyper-realistic paintings).

From chirography to technography

There is certainly some truth in Barthes’ intuition, however confusedly expressed, which locates the

difference between photographs and hand-made pictures in the global and piece-meal character of the

respective rules of transformation. One of the disturbing facts about post-photographic pictures, however,

is that they are not hand-made, but still allow for local transformations.

While contemplating the prospects of a "science of depiction", in some ways analogous to linguistics, the

psychologist James Gibson proposed a primary distinction between two large categories of picture signs,

or, more generally, between those signs which constitute markings on surfaces: between photographic and

chirographic pictures, that is, literally, pictures produced by the workings of luminosity on a surface, and

pictures the markings of which are assembled by hand. According to Gibson (1978:228f; 1980) a picture is

"a surface so treated that it makes available a limited optic array /---/ of persisting invariants of structure"

at some point of observation. But he also speculates that to prehistoric man, just as to the child, the picture

make up "a progressive record of movement", a layout receptive to traces, long before it is discovered also

to "delineate something". If the record is of a stylus, brush, pen, pencil, crayon, marker or another hand-

held tool, the result will be a chirographic picture; and if the traces have been produced by a camera,

including its accessory equipment, we will have a photographic picture.

Considered in this way, chirographic pictures, just like photographic ones, are largely indexical: they are

indexical of all forces contributing to produce them. It has been suggested that, to the toddler, the marks

left on the paper are accidental traces of a motor activity which is at first experienced as rewarding in

itself; only at about 18 months, with the emergence of the semiotic function, will the child react with

disappointment when no strokes and dots result form the contact of the marker with the paper, and only at

3 years will he refuse to draw in the air (Cf. Gardner 1973:215ff; 1980ff). What was, in Hjelmslevean

terms, at first accidental substance now becomes the very form of the act, defined by the principle or

relevance known to us as the making of a drawing. Put in another way, chirographic pictures are indexical

in origin: only later will iconicity come to the fore. Contrary to the case of photography, chirographic

indexicality is thus entirely distinct from the iconic relation.

The "photograms" made by avant-garde photographers such as Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Schaad, as

well as preceding the invention of the common photograph in the experimental work of Niepce and

Talbot, could be considered limiting-cases: they are actually comparable to the foot-prints left on the

ground, light being the operating agent instead of mechanical pressure. When placed directly upon the

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